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From: rs55611@ihuxk.UUCP (Robert E. Schleicher)
Newsgroups: net.books
Subject: Re: "Tales from the 1001 Nights"
Message-ID: <1032@ihuxk.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 25-Nov-85 13:42:46 EST
Article-I.D.: ihuxk.1032
Posted: Mon Nov 25 13:42:46 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 26-Nov-85 20:32:06 EST
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Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
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> Any halfway respectable bookstore should have a copy of
> this. Try the Penguin Classic Books edition. However,
> finding the version that you remember is rather more
> difficult. Nobody really agrees on which stories make up
> the set, and so different editions carry different subsets.
> For example, the 'Sinbad' stories are popularly included,
> even though they were (probably) not in the original.
> 
> If you read a young person's edition then you may find that
> you quickly become bored with the full translation - it
> does tend to be full of phrases such as 'O King live for
> ever' and 'Praise be to Al-lah'.
> 
> In addition, most editions printed more than ~15 years ago
> were based on a translation done in the last century by a
> English gentleman (whose name eludes me), whose work
> reflected the then current mores. In other words it was
> heavily bowdlerized. If you are into censoring what your
> children are exposed to then pre-reading of a modern
> translation is advised. It can get quite explicit in places
> (and I do *not* consider phrases such as 'her thighs were
> like white marble; her breasts were like <fill in your
> favourite metaphor here>' to be explicit).
> -- 
> Jonathan Clark
> [NAC]!mtung!jhc
> 
> My walk has become rather more silly lately.

Is the English gentleman referred to above named Sir Richard
Francis Burton?  In Philip Jose Farmer's science fiction "Riverworld"
series, the main characters are real-life people who are resurrected on
a new world called the Riverworld.  One of the main characters is
Richard Francis Burton, who is described as a 19th century adventurer
who, among other things, discovered lake Tanganyika (or some other
well-known African lake; and I mean "discovered" in the sense that he
was the first European to see it), and also wrote and compiled a
translation of the 1001 Arabian Nights.

Since the descriptions of all the other major characters seem to be based
on historical figures, at least as far as I was able to tell, it would seem
that Burton's character was also based on fact.  Anyone know more about
this?

Bob Schleicher
ihuxk!rs55611
: